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INTRODUCTION
Every discipline can be seen as a particular knowledge system that is a component of a more general knowledge system. Within each discipline, journal articles, books, and monographs fill the fundamental role of storing and distributing information. Of these three means of formal communication, journal articles are perhaps the most competitive and controversial. Consequently, citations that appear in articles published in the journals of a particular discipline provide an objective measure of the contributions of other knowledge systems to the development and progress of that particular discipline. Citations also give a relative measure of the particular contributions of articles, individuals, institutions, journals, and countries to the progress of a particular field of knowledge. As a result, citation analysis has been used extensively in accounting, economics, finance, management science, and marketing to explore the inner workings of these knowledge systems and their interrelationship with other disciplines. Prior published studies have assessed the relative contribution of individuals and institutions to international business research by using opinion surveys or number of articles published in international business journals, and have not incorporated citation analysis.
In this paper, we use citation analysis to examine the influence of individuals on international business research, to determine which disciplines and journals have had the greatest influence on international business research, and to identify those specific articles exerting the greatest impact on international business research. A natural by-product of this analysis is an assessment of the impact of a variety of research journals on international business research. The paper is divided into five sections. The method of citation analysis is discussed in section one. Section two describes the database for this study. The impact of various disciplines, and journals on international business research is presented in section three. Section four identifies the individuals that have exerted the greatest influence on international business research. Conclusions are presented in section five.
CITATION ANALYSIS
Citations are explicit linkages between articles that have common aspects. Therefore, citations included in journal articles are a measure of the innovativeness of pieces of research being cited, reflecting the extent to which other researchers have considered those pieces useful to their own research efforts and, as a result, to the development of their own field of knowledge. Similarly, the number of...